Greg Hinz On Politics

Why I have to speak out on gay marriage

I had decided not to opine on the same-sex marriage debate in Springfield. But I've changed my mind—or, more accurately, my mind has been changed.

I have a personal interest in this subject. My partner, Mel, and I talk about it on occasion at dinner, when the subject of how to care for our aging, ailing mothers doesn't come up first. That, though, is different from writing publicly about a subject on which I can't claim objectivity.

The Roman Catholic Church, however, has done and said some things that made me reconsider my vow of silence. In particular, the manner in which church leaders like Cardinal Francis George put down those who disagree with them has become too much. When did those who lead God's church decide to start acting like a bunch of coldly calculating, victory-at-all-costs, arm-twisting pols?

Two specifics come to mind.

In the first, and smaller, case, the bishop of the Springfield diocese last week called in police and vowed to bar the cathedral door to anyone who showed up with a gay rainbow sash for a threatened rosary protest, in which participants would say their Hail Marys and Our Fathers in a prayer for legal gay marriage in Illinois. Such activity would constitute “blasphemy,” disputing God's word in his own house, Bishop Thomas John Paprocki declared.

To the extent anyone was going to disrupt services—I know of no evidence of that—the bishop was perfectly correct. But calling the prayer itself “blasphemy” doesn't make sense.

My main beef, though, is the ultimatum Cardinal George issued last summer to the Illinois Coalition on Immigrant and Refugee Rights.

The group mostly is known for its views on U.S. immigration reform. But, for its own reasons, its board decided to endorse the gay-marriage bill. The archdiocese reacted by threatening to cut off hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants to 11 smallish community groups that are part of the coalition unless they quit the group.

It's the coalition that “broke faith with its member organizations when it publicly supported so-called 'same-sex marriage,' “ the cardinal wrote in an open letter posted on the Chicago Archdiocese website. “It is intellectually and morally dishonest to use the witness of the church's concern for the poor as an excuse to attack the church's teaching on the nature of marriage.”

Faced with a choice between taking the church's money and deciding with whom they can associate, eight of the 11 decided to defy the church and stay with the coalition; a ninth left but rejected the money. Since they decided to stick up for me and mine, I feel compelled to stick up for them.

So let me say this: The Catholic Church, the cardinal, the bishop, your priest or minister—anyone—is entitled to whatever views on the marriage question they want. That's the core of Western thought and American law. And I suppose that if the coalition is getting church money, the church is within its rights to ask that it not be spent on salaries for those who promote something the church doesn't like.

But demanding that coalition members that have said little or nothing about marriage leave a group dedicated to immigration reform unless it adopts the church's line on marriage, well, that's over the top. It's classic guilt by association, a contemporary version of what a certain senator from Wisconsin did in the 1950s.

Two other points.

One, for those who might think that gay marriage is an odd subject for commentary in a business publication, I point you to what company after company has said in moving or expanding in Chicago: talent counts. And to the extent that legal gay marriage is the norm not only on the coasts but in the heartland states of Minnesota and Iowa, the message that's going out to some talent is: Don't come to Illinois. You are not valued here.

Two, I encourage folks to recall what Pope Francis said recently about the Catholic Church's “obsession” with gay marriage. I'm beginning to understand what he meant.